by Rita Ciresi
“Mama and Babbo never had terrible things happen to them the way we do,” she said.
Lina did not have a happy marriage. I had no marriage at all. As Lina cried, I looked up into the mirror. The face that stared back at me—the faded skin unsuccessfully hidden beneath too-rosy blush, and the dark circles unbleached beneath the concealer crayoned on under my eyes—seemed to show signs of having undergone much more than Mama and Babbo ever had. Still, I couldn't stand listening to Lina's self-pity.
“How can you say that?” I asked her. “I'm sure they went through just as much as we have, and even worse.”
Lina shook her head. “They didn't want things to be perfect, the way we do.” She buried her head in the pillow. She cried and sniffed. Then she raised her face. “Ugh,” she said. “This pillow smells like his feet.” She tossed it angrily to the floor.
“Get a grip,” I said.
“I don't want to.” Lina's lips and jaw tightened, and for a moment she looked exactly like the girl who spent her teenage years picking senseless fights with Mama and Babbo: singing rebellious songs, tossing around the occasional fuck and shit, rearranging the furniture when Mama and Babbo weren't home, and contradicting them when they insisted that things were fine just the way they were, so why did she have to go and change them? Unlike me, who dealt with her dissatisfaction by curling up in a chair with a good book or lying in bed filling my head with dreams that occupied me for hours, Lina went wild. She turned boy crazy. Her rebellion came to a head when she was seventeen and announced her desire to attend music school in New York. Babbo wanted her to stay in New Haven.
“Why do I have to stay here?” Lina yelled. “Why do I have to stay anywhere? You always act as though people gotta do what they gotta do. It's not true. People have choices. You don't gotta be poor. You don't gotta drive a soda truck. You don't gotta have stinky feet. You don't gotta give the cigar ring to the loser!”
That loser, of course, was me, who grew faint to hear her say such things to Babbo, and who escaped from the house by the back door to avoid seeing how he would convince her—with the back of his hand—that a good fight didn't always get a girl whatever it was she wanted to get.
I looked down at the shopping bags full of Babbo's clothes. “Do you want any of this stuff?” I asked Lina.
“What for?”
“I don't know. Phil or the kids. I might take one or two of these shirts just in case I want to paint my apartment or do dirty work.” I held up one of Babbo's gray polo shirts, then crumpled it up and stuffed it back into the bag.
“Are those stinky slippers of his still in the closet?” Lina asked.
“Probably,” I said.
We were silent for a while. I knew Lina, like me, was thinking of how we used to raid Babbo's things like a pair of female pirates. Now we didn't want anything.
Finally Lina said, “If those pictures are still in that leather box, I'll take the one of Mama. You can keep the rest.”
I opened the top drawer of Babbo's chest. I took out the leather box—there were still a few handfuls of change inside—and pulled out the photographs. I flipped through all the pictures until I came to the one of Babbo's supposed girlfriend, inscribed with the word mine, at the bottom of the stack.
Deep inside I always must have known that the slim, dashing young woman in the close-fitting suit and coy little hat was my mother. But I hadn't wanted to admit it. It seemed impossible— even obscene!—that the smiling girl blithely standing on the boardwalk could turn into the woman who pressed her grim lips together to mutter, “Out of my way, you!” as she marched off to novena or stormed past us to scour out the toilet. And so my dreams had gotten the best of me, leading me to hope that this young version of my mother—in the form of my father's lover— was still alive somewhere, standing in line at the movie theater, flipping through a copy of Life in the doctor's waiting room, or holding a melon up to her nose in the produce aisle.
“You told me she was his girlfriend,” I said, half-accusing Lina of making me purposefully stupid. “You said she sold cigars, remember?”
“Exactas and trifectas,” said Lina. “And perfectas.” She stared at the ceiling. “That was just like Babbo, wasn't it, to bet on a bunch of horses and never take risks on anything else?”
“What makes your life any better?” I asked.
“How about yours?” Lina countered.
I bit my lip. I wasn't holding any winning tickets. Still, if I listened close enough, sometimes I could still hear in the distance the thunder of my horse's hooves pounding triumphantly across the finish line.
“Everyone has a dream,” I told my sister.
Lina shrugged. She held out her hand. “Let me have that picture.”
For a moment, I both hated and admired her, for wanting and demanding so much. I felt like putting the photo back in the box and burying it at the bottom of one of the bags beneath a pile of musty clothes. Instead, I surrendered it to Lina, but not without reminding her, “Careful. This was his.”
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD before I realized my father's name, in American, meant Charles Wolf. Lina and I called our father Babbo. Mama called him Pop. Nonna called him Carlucci, and our uncles called him Looch or Lino. Only the utility bills in their stiff, forbidding white envelopes dared to address him by his full and formal name, Carlino Pasquale Lupo. Junk mail, in sharp contrast, came bannered with large bold type that announced, YOU'RE A MILLION DOLLAR WINNER, CARLA!
Babbo didn't take very kindly to having his sex changed by mail. “What do I look like, some kind of fruitcake or something?” he said, before he threw the Carla envelopes in the trash. When his back was turned, Mama rescued the envelopes from the wastebasket and eagerly ripped them open. She had three passions in life: funerals, church bazaars, and mail-order sweepstakes. She entered every contest that came her way, confident that it was just a matter of time before she won a trip to Waikiki, a snazzy red sports car, or a dream vacation home that looked like an Alpine ski lodge.
“You can't win if you don't play,” she said, as she sat at the kitchen table, cutting out the Publishers Clearing House stickers with her best Singer sewing scissors, as if neatness would increase her chances of claiming the jackpot. With a prolonged swipe of her tongue, she licked the stamps and pressed them into place with her thumb, leaning forward with all her weight. “Cheap glue,” she muttered as she crisscrossed the stickers with Scotch tape.
Lina and I scorned the whole business.
“You're not going to win,” I said.
“Perchè?” Mama asked.
“Because you're not Carla,” I said.
“So I'll go down to Fontina's and become Carla,” she said, snapping her fingers, “just like that.”
Fontina, a wizened man with rawhide skin, was the shoemaker. In the back of his shop he purportedly had a special machine that could manufacture false IDs.
“You won't win,” Lina said, “because you're not ordering any magazines.”
Mama pointed to the entry form. “It says right here, in plain English, you don't have to order.”
“You don't get something for nothing,” Lina insisted.
Mama shrugged. “Tutti hanno i sogni.”
Everybody has their dreams. So the men in our family went to the track. The women entered raffles and went to bingo. Every Thursday night Mama's eyes shone as she sealed her red wooden chips in a fresh plastic bag. “I can just feel it,” she said. “Tonight's my night.” Two hours later she came home clutching yet another set of laminated holy cards or another plastic figurine of an apostle, a virgin martyr, or some obscure saint. The cash bonus at bingo—as well as the Easter ham and the Thanksgiving turkey—so far had eluded her. But she refused to give up. Contests were the American way.
When I asked her once what she missed most about Italy, she said, “Nothing! The streets smelled like mule poop. And imagine, there were no prizes.”
When I put the same question to Babbo, he thought about it for a moment before he s
aid, “Sunlight.”
We lived in New Haven, where the murky green harbor smelled like raw mussels, and the sky, above the giant oil tanks that squatted onshore, seemed perpetually gray. Babbo worked as a delivery man for Dixon Park Soda, and it was at the company's distribution center that I first realized something was amiss about his name. Usually Babbo drove home from work in one of the company trucks and parked it in our driveway overnight, where it served as an advertisement to the whole neighborhood that Dixon Park soda was Clean, Refreshing, and Oh So Bubbly Good! But that night his truck had to be serviced, so Mama, Lina, and I went to pick him up.
We parked in the corner of the distribution center, far away from the huge trucks that were pulling in and out of the lot. Steep metal stairs led up to the loading dock. Exhaust fans from the warehouse made the platform vibrate.
Through the main door of Dixon Park came a man as short and squat as a fire hydrant. He pushed a handcart. He squinted at us, then shouted over his shoulder, “Cholly! Hey, Cholly! Family's here!”
“We're not here for any Charlie,” Mama said, just before Babbo appeared from behind a flat of wooden crates, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “This is who we're looking for—Carlino.”
“That's Cholly in American, capisce?” The man laughed and pushed the handcart out to an open truck.
Mama pressed her lips together and her back stiffened. “Who's that character?” she asked Babbo.
“His name's Shorty.”
“They ought to call him Lazy, talking so much on the job.” She paused. “They call you Charlie here?”
Babbo shrugged. He tossed the rag down on one of the crates and motioned to Mama that it was time to go. Lina and I followed a few steps behind. With her mouth up to my ear, Lina whispered, “Go ahead. I dare you. Do it.”
I was the family poet. Whenever we encountered a new word or something unusual worth poking fun at, Lina egged me on to make up a rhyme. Cholly, holly, collie, polly went through my head before I halted on the platform, stiffened my arms by my side, splayed my fingers, and launched into a tap dance and song:
Oh you're my Cholly-Pop
My lollipop
Don't drop the mop
Or get stopped by a cop.
We burst out laughing at the awkward rhythm and rhyme. Mama turned and shook a finger at us. Then she marched back to where we stood and pinched my ear. “Orphan train,” she said.
Mama rolled the orphan train onto the tracks whenever we were acting naughty, sometimes as a two-word warning and other times complete with all the bag and baggage that accompanied her other you better be grateful speeches. Lina and I used to roll our eyes—and afterward make fake fart noises—whenever Mama started in like this: “Those were hard days—hard times! Right before we came over came the flu. It swept across the country and killed thousands of people. Children lost their parents, their grandparents. Imagine, they rounded those kids up and sent them on trains to all sorts of crazy places—Indiana, Nebraska, Wyoming. The kids, they had to work as slaves on farms—for Germans, no less. They had to speak English. They had to change their last names. They had to dye their hair blond.”
The moral of this story: We had better cut out the funny stuff, or we would drive Mama and Babbo right into their graves and win ourselves a one-way ticket on the orphan train.
Little did Mama realize how the lowly chug of that train sounded like great and glorious music to our ears. Our lives were so dull and boring. We never got to see anything new; we never got to travel anywhere. The mere thought of embarking on such an adventure thrilled us to no end. “Mama and Babbo wouldn't have to die,” Lina reasoned. “They could just… well, disappear for a year or two. Then they could put us on the orphan train by mistake and we could go away for a while and come back with new identities.”
“I want to be honey blond,” I said.
“I want to be so pale,” Lina said, “that people will ask me if I'm sick.”
I had inherited Mama's light complexion, but Lina had Babbo's olive skin. We both had hair so jet it shone like the hood of a freshly waxed Black Maria. Lina at least had cheekbones to make up for her big nose, but I had a face as round as a melon and a peasant's heavy chin. Neither of us wanted to look like what we looked like or be what we felt fate had determined us to be: nice girls who married our father's third, fourth, or fifth cousin's nephew, godson, or cousin-in-law. Marriage outside of the family circle seemed the only way out. Lina said she was going to marry a Swede so at least her kids came out the right color. I vowed to snag a Jones or a Smith.
All the way home from the warehouse, Lina leaned her chin on the open window of the car, staring at the storefronts we passed. She kept quiet. I could tell she was plotting something. At dinner that night, when Babbo was halfway through his bowl of penne, she said, “Why don't you call yourself Charles all the time? Or Chuck?”
Babbo grunted and kept on eating.
“We don't need any crazy names around here,” Mama said.
“Charles isn't crazy,” Lina said. “It's dignified.”
“Chuck sounds good too,” I said. “Friendly.”
Mama glanced at Babbo. His face was turning red. “State zitte and eat,” she warned us.
But Lina wouldn't let it go. “We should all change our names.”
“What for?” Mama said.
“So we sound normal.”
“You want to sound normal?” Mama said. “Then stop talking nonnormal.”
Lina kept on going. “There's a saying that says, When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Babbo took one hand and gestured around the cramped, cluttered kitchen. “Does this look like Rome to you?” he said.
Lina shook her head. “That's my point. This isn't Italy.”
Babbo pointed his fork at Lina. It was crusted with tomato sauce, and the piece of penne speared on the end wiggled precariously each time he jabbed it forward to punctuate his speech. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “When I first came to this country, I stood in line with my father—for hours—waiting to sign in. There were two officers sitting at the table. The one on the left tried to spell people's names right. The other one, he said, ‘Too many vowels!’ You said LaRonda, he turned it into Leroy. Giacome he made into Jackson.”
“Colored people's names,” Mama said. “Imagine.”
“So what if some people are colored?” Lina asked. “At least their names sound American.”
“You think coloreds like their names?” Babbo asked. “Look at ‘em, on TV, changing their names all the time so they sound like a bunch of Arab sheiks. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Muhammad Ali. What's the matter with Lew Alcindor, Cassius Clay?” Babbo took the container of parmesan and furiously shook a cloud of cheese over his pasta. “You want to know who changes their name? Crooks, that's who. The rest of us ought to be thankful we've got an honest name.”
Upstairs, after dinner, Lina sat on the edge of her bed, twirling her hair around one finger. “Why should I be grateful for having a name that sounds like some weird kind of macaroni?” she said. “I can't stand being Pasqualina Lupo. I don't want a grandfather named Guido. I don't want an Uncle Luigi!”
“How about me,” I said glumly. My name was Angelina, but everyone called me Angel. Lina couldn't even begin to imagine how difficult it was to live up to that.
Lina stuck out her tongue. “Italian names suck.”
“Some of them sound dignified,” I said.
“Like which?”
“Grimaldi. Rinaldi. Del Vecchio.”
“Those are all right.”
“And some of them actually sound kind of normal. The kind people can pronounce, like Romano.”
“Everybody famous changes their name,” Lina said.
“That's not true,” I said. “There's an actress who has almost the same last name as we do.”
“Ida Lupino is ugly,” Lina said. “And she plays character roles. I don't want to be a character. I want to be a star.” She flung herself down on the bed a
nd kicked the bedspread. “If Babbo doesn't change his name, then I'm not calling him Babbo anymore.”
“So what're you going to call him?”
Lina stared at the ceiling. “You,” she said.
Lina was worried. It was one thing to be Pasqualina in the Holy Redeemer Elementary School. But next month she was going to start junior high in a public school across town. She was convinced she wouldn't survive roll call the first day. The homeroom teacher would stand and read her full name off the list just as Saint Peter called out the names of those who were to step to the left or the right on Judgment Day. Lina would be damned.
Just as she expected, Lina was miserable in junior high school. The Irish girls shortened Pasqualina to Squats or Mama Lina; one day a boy pushed her up against a locker and said, “I bet your mother's a nigger.” Lina often came home in tears. The only class she liked was Italian. The teacher, on the first day of school, went around the room and translated all the non-Italian names into
Italian. Mark became Marco, Joseph became Giuseppe, Vicky became Vittoria. Then, just for fun, the teacher translated all the Italian names into English. Pasqualina Lupo became Patty Wolf.
“Wolf,” Lina said. “Isn't that a great name? Babbo—I mean you—I mean him—could be Charles Wolf. Mama could be Phyllis Wolf instead of Filomena Lupo. You'd be Ann Wolf.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“We could start a club,” Lina said. “The Wolf Pack. No, I've got it. We're the Wolverines. We have to have a motto.”
“Have no shame of your name,” I suggested.
“Good. Right. We'll have meetings every night. We'll call them to order with a wolf's howl.” Lina scratched her head. “What does a wolf sound like, anyway?”
The howl sound we came up with probably resembled more of a coyote's yelp, but we didn't care. “What's going on up there?” Mama yelled upstairs. “Sounds like a bunch of sick dogs or something.” We closed the door. Mama and Babbo did not deserve to be privy to our secrets.
As Wolverines, our goal was to educate the common, unenlightened folk—our family, friends, and neighbors—that we lived in the United States now. At home, if Mama referred to the carciofi or the collino, Lina said, “I believe you mean the artichokes?” or “You must be referring to the colander” in a clear, semi-British voice that made her sound like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. If Nonna said ciao, I reminded her it wasn't time to eat. If we were sent to the market, we brought home A&P brand macaroni instead of di Cecco, and Sunbeam bread instead of the crusty loaves, wrapped in wax paper, from Manfredo's Bakery.